When Amazon switched over to "frustration free" packaging last year—using minimal materials to ease the strain on the environment—they unwittingly became the prime suspect in a string of hard disk drive deaths. Behold the trail of sorrow:
Bits don't have expiration dates. But memories will only live forever if the media and file formats holding them remain intact and coherent. Time can be as deadly to data storage as it is to carbon-based life forms.
The first hard drive, from 1956, was housed in a computer the size of two refrigerators. But in less than a quarter of the century, engineers shrunk hard drives to 5.25". The first, holding 5MB, was Seagate's ST-506.
The IBM 305 RAMAC, which debuted in 1956, was the first computer with a hard drive. It was 16 square feet, weighed over a ton, and had to be transported by plane. But it sure as Hell beat punch cards.
Considering the fact that Windows XP is still the most-used OS worldwide, anyone considering swapping out their old hard drives for a new one should heed this advice: be careful. You may want to even consider not doing it.
Roughly 1,800 external drives manufactured by Seagate were infected with a Trojan horse virus that sent personal information back to China, according to the Taipei Times. The disk drives, sold at retail in Taiwan, were presumably messed with when they were in the possession of one of Seagate's Chinese subcontractors.…
Click to viewThe bad news is, we have discovered a Leopard-related issue that may very well throw a monkey wrench into your Time Machine. Anyone trying to use Time Machine with a previously PC-formatted drive could be at risk. The good news is, there is an easy—albeit none-too-obvious—fix. Here's the dilly-o:
There has been a ridiculous amount of news this past week about portable hard drives of the 2.5-inch variety. OWC introduced a 160GB 7200rpm portable. Samsung did one better announcing a 200GB 7200rpm 2.5-inch drive, but that was a tease: It would initially only be available to enterprise customers.
Seems like just yesterday when the world was all excited about OWC's packaging of a 2.5-in. 160GB 7200rpm drive Seagate Momentus drive with perpendicular recording capability. No time to enjoy that view: Samsung just upped the stakes with a 2.5-inch perpendicular-recording drive of its own. Capacity? 200GB. The…
